By Wednesday, 17 September 2025, 12:28 Pm Opinion: Binoy Kampmark

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These people are a charming, lynch worthy bunch. In
claiming they are short of cash, the managerial dunderheads
at the University of Technology Sydney thought it prudent to
throw A$4.8 million at the tax consultants KPMG to design
what it calls the Operational Sustainability Initiative
(OSI). The linking of these three words alone suggests that
something sinister and inhumane is afoot, a program closer
to an assassination or disposal program than a sensible
readjustment. Indeed, the OSI became
the subject of a “notice to give information” in
June from Safework NSW, accusing the university of “wilful
and negligent mismanagement” of the restructuring
undertaking “despite full knowledge that the process is
causing significant psychological harm to staff, including
documented instances of suicidal ideation, anxiety, and
depression.”

The university, as reported in The
Australian Financial Review in May, was hoping to give a
savage pruning to the institution’s budget to the value of
A$100 million. This initially involved
the sacking of 400 staff members, a proposal cooked up
even as five senior UTS executives travelled
to the United States on an alumni trip worth A$140,000. That
financially minded paper also wondered
why UTS ended up using KPMG “instead of its own staff to
design this plan” in an adventurously asinine contract
stuffed with such terms as “leveraging solutions”,
“acceleration of value”, and “decision trees”.
(Meaningless terms suggest a mind without meaning.) KPMG
crows in convoluted ecstasy about a “six-layer framework
for target operating model design”. No wonder the
technocrats were so wooed by it all.

The suggested
program from the firm was ordinary and, as with most
products arising from such an organisation, prosaic. It
could have just as easily been done by clumsy butchers with
a plagiarised MBA. KPMG produced
spreadsheets dealing with courses and subjects that might be
offered in future, which ones deserved to be confined to
oblivion and what areas of research warranted interest as
opposed to those that did not. Just to confirm the firm’s
almost awe-inspiring lack of expertise, it was also called
upon to examine “current and future state teaching

Part of the tool
kit of advice developed by KPMG to staff most likely
heading for the chop developed into a ragbag of nonsense and
piffle: to stay mentally sound, best wash delicates with
your hands. Try to take up baking, because that is what a
disturbed mind awaiting imminent suffering needs. Keep a
gratitude journal. Make sure to brush and floss your teeth,
because you obviously did not do that before a consultancy
firm hired by a university told you to

There is every reason to suppose that
ChatGPT could have come up with the same, risible nonsense,
saving the shameful creeps in management some cash. But
sound reasoning is not a prerequisite to those rising up the
greasy towers of technocracy in learning institutions, let
alone any other institution. Incompetence is often
essential, while talent and ethical worth are impediments
best done away with.

The vice-chancellor of the
university is very much short of parfit, though sports the
name Andrew Parfitt. He is adamant that no decisions have
been made on job losses or the discontinuing of any courses
which, knowing the pattern of university practices, is
precisely the opposite of what will happen. “The temporary
suspension is aimed at prospective new students for 2026.”
This is the sort of shoddy reasoning we have come to expect
from the vice-chancellorship and any number of university
proconsuls and viceroys that suck the lifeblood out of
education. Ella Haid, spokesperson of the UTS Students
Association General Councillor and Stop the Cuts UTS, is
hard to fault in her
assessment on this: “We should be clear that
management is doing this because they’re pursuing a hefty
financial surplus. They’ve no interest in seeking student
or staff consultation on this major
restructure.”

The response from UTS to reports,
notably by the ABC, was one of dastardly fudging, oily
manoeuvring and sickly denial. Rather than admitting to
blunder, organisational insensitivity, and being outed, it
attacked the national broadcaster for its reporting in a statement.
“We are disappointed that the ABC reported that these
comprehensive support initiatives were only rolled out as a
result of their reporting.”

The reports, claimed the
university, had ignored context. “By focusing on just six
dot points from a single article on an external wellbeing
hub comprising extensive, differentiated resources, the ABC
chose to portray this as being representative of the tone,
intent and totality of support provided to UTS
employees.”

The parasitic problems associated with
university management have become critically colossal. Being
unable to exist without attachment to the authentic
university, that pulsing, thriving organism of cerebration
sustained by students and research, the leadership of such
bodies continues to make decisions that harm academic staff
and any chance of a rich learning experience for students.

from the National Tertiary Education Union of 380
respondents from UTS found that 35% had experienced high
levels of psychological distress from the OSI
endeavour.)

That harm is then justified through
cringeworthy programs of “wellbeing” and assistance,
their very existence intended to exonerate the misdeeds of
culprits who shamelessly engender an environment of
emotional and intellectual terrorism. They create the
bullets, use them, and drag out the psychological bandaging
to conceal the wounds.

Should courage ever be mustered
by cowed academics and the atomised student body, the cosmos
of the vice-chancellor and those complicit in sustaining it
can finally be terminated with little sorrow and much

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth
Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures
at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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